Supporting our Partners through validation events

As part of the partner work for Enable we had a successful partner validation recorded in the Ning community last week, with Stafford college. They were complemented on the working relationship between the college and the university, however they have been told to change their Award handbook, to be less Staffordshire University focused. This is interesting as the Award Handbook is a faculty document that is partially built from a template provided by the Student Office, however this template is purely for Staffordshire University, on-site, learners. I have spoken to our College partnership team and found that they don't provide anything so how do faculties handle award documents for colleges? What guidance (if any) do they get? This has now been raised in Ning and hopefully we will get some answers. As part of us understanding the partnership relationship I have also added a short quiz on the site around how much support partners perceive they get both from colleagues and the university, so far 100% of results is possitive about the support they get from both. In the meantime I have sent the relevant colleges the next spreadsheet for finding out the stage that the awards they told me about in January are now at.

Back from Easter

Well I have been quiet on the blog for the last month due to holidays and meetings, and for the next two weeks this will continue to be the case as I am out of the office with a friends wedding, a JISC day and our cluster meeting. I am also busy writing an assignment on Strategic Management and Change which has been presented to Gill Howland. I might post it, and the related presentation here if people are interested. As promised to Ashton I have finally had time to put their video up of them signing the consortium agreement.

One thing that has changed with the project is the slower that anticipated co-ordination of project partners. This is due to the very busy schedules both here at the university and at the colleges themselves. This may actually benefit the project as it will be able to involve the partners more towards the end of the project than initially considered.

Partner Colleges, language and terms

We had our last project partner welcome meeting on Friday afternoon, and all in all it was a very interesting meeting. We did the usual presentation (which can be seen on the main project blog - http://jiscenable.blogspot.com/2008/10/partners-join-in.html) and some good points were raised:

1. The presentation uses a number of slides from the SMWG meeting and were seen as too academic in language in comparison to the FE colleges, although the language for the presentation was pitched at the right level the slides on their own were too much. I guess this means I might have to record a "pitch" to go with the slides on line...
2. That the language used for the partners was assumptive - use of "HE Forum" is not something at each college, some use the term lifelong learning group, although they do the same thing.

This leads to a couple of thoughts, and I hope that it will raise a discussion up either here, or in the Validation Support Network that the partner colleges are all invited to (http://divascommunityofpractice.ning.com).

• How does the join between colleges and the university work? From the University there is a Link Tutor, but what about before the award is developed? Who contacts who from the college to the university?
• How is HE provision managed at the colleges?

Any thoughts/ comments etc welcome

Partners

The project partner presentation at Newcastle went really well and seemed very positive. They gave us some thoughts on where they would see the Enable project, plus seemed very open to the idea of using blogs and reflecting on the processes involved in curriculum design, and development. We managed to make a clear distinction between the Enable project and DIVAS during this meeting, as we are still planning on using the Validation Support Network to capture the reflective process. They have collected a number of awards that are in development at the college, and have one more interview before we get the templates back all completed. We will then need to think of a way of capturing when those developments change status - something to think about for the new year I feel. I have also contacted Shrewsbury to find out where they are with capturing award information, it looks like we might be waiting for the New Year before that information comes to us, but is on the list. I will be popping to see the Shrewsbury team just before Christmas to see if they are happy and also give them an overview of the project and what is happening. Once I have finished this blog its time to spend some time with the To Do list in Outlook so nothing gets over looked.

Partners Join in

We had a partner meeting on Friday morning which enabled us to speak for the first time with the partners about their involvement in the project. They seemed very positive about how this would help them engage with the university more and hopefully impact on the processes developed at the university. Unfortunately Ashton and Burton were unable to attend so we will have to run a meeting at those colleges, ensuring that we get the same backing from them. We have agreed a draft schedule of work in their absence and also discussed the expectations for the project,including the signing of a consortium agreement.



We are really ready to get going on seeing partners and discussing their baseline experiences with them, and have already got one date down to see the HE team at Newcastle college. Richard has agreed to manage the Focus Groups as Partner Liaison, and Sue did a great job of promoting the Validation Support Network to the senior managers, and will be doing the same at the partner colleges, as long as she is free. The partners did raise some issues about how we clearly mark work done on the validation support network as Enable, rather than staff simply participating in DIVAS, and I am planning a meeting with Sue to bash this one out this week.

Diff'rent Strokes!

The Progamme meeting in Oxford was at the start of this week and went really well. We have now all been asigned to different cluster groups based on project similarities. We worked together for the two days in discussing what we hoped to achieve and although we had different projects we were all very interested in what the other projects where trying to achieve.

To work out which group we belonged in we had to do a short TV show pitch to the group on the project. Here is what was prepared for the day, although we could not use it on the day.



While we put the our pitches to each other we relaxed in large bean bags rather than using the normal chair setup!



During the session "Tomorrows World" we put together a list of successes for 2012 that I thought would be worth recording here.
Outcomes

• Coherent and flexible product portfolio which is sufficiently small to be effective
• Better student experience
• Regional and national employers engaged with the university which is known to be responsive in nature
• Business processes around curriculum design are sufficient and operate coherently across partners
• Above processes will be transparent to all involved
• Use of technology to support and enhance is both diverse and connected
• Policies exercise minimal level of control while sustaining innovation.
  We also have a programme level community site that I need to take a look at.

First Senior Management Working Group meeting

All went well at the SMWG meeting on Tuesday, we almost had a full complement of senior managers and everyone had something to contribute to the meeting. After introductions Mark went through a presentation covering the context of the project (this is quite long so may take some time to load):



Mark also introduced the first of the Issues that the project is hoping to raise awareness off (and hopefully find a solution to). Sam (the Technical Manager for the project) did a great job with a presentation on Identity Management which was found to be a barrier in a number of recent projects including SUNIWE and SURF WBL-Way:



This got the SMWG talking about how they should raise awareness of this problem and how it should be addressed. There was consensus around the table that this was a big issue for the University and was something that needed to be addressed.

A lot of questions were around the project documentation and governance and as the project moves forward a number of these documents will be released. We will be using our local repository, HIVE to store project and spoke documents, and they can be accessed by the project via the closed forum created in phpBBServer.

Project Partners

I had my first meeting with Richard yesterday, to talk about how to bring the project partner colleges on board and what we expect of them. We are organising a meeting to introduce the partners to the ideas behind Enable and also to talk about what will be expected of them, both in the short term and over the period of the project. This is scheduled to occur at the end of October. In the meantime I will be introducing the Enable project to the SURF Curriculum Mananagment Board later on this morning.